40th anniversary of Hall & Oates' Abandoned Luncheonette'

There was a time in the mid to late-1970s when fans and curiosity seekers would search out a dilapidated diner that sat in a wooded area just off Route 724 in Kenilworth.

Souvenir hunters eventually picked apart the already long-ignored structure, which at one time had been the Rosedale Diner in Pottstown.

Daryl Hall still has some pieces of the old diner.

Advertisement

“Fans came from all over the world. And unfortunately for the guy who owned it, they basically destroyed it, they ripped it apart tile by tile, piece by piece,” said Hall.

“Somebody gave me some tiles from it over the years. I’ve gotten little pieces of it from fans. That’s really an unusual story.”

Indeed it is. But over the past 40 years, it’s remained an iconic story not only for the locals but for anyone who’s a fan of Daryl Hall and John Oates, the most successful duo in the history of rock ’n’ roll.

That’s because the old Rosedale Diner, after it stopped being the Rosedale Diner on High Street in Pottstown and was moved outside of town and essentially left to die in East Coventry, became the “Abandoned Luncheonette” and a picture of it served as the cover art on Hall & Oates’ second album.

That album, also titled “Abandoned Luncheonette,” essentially put the local musicians — Hall from Pottstown and a graduate of Owen J. Roberts High School and Oates from North Wales and a graduate of North Penn High School — on the road to superstardom.

It’s been 40 years since the now-iconic album’s release in 1973, and both Hall and Oates remain proud of the record. Oates goes as far as to say it’s his favorite Hall & Oates album ever.

“There’s something about it that’s very, very special,” said Oates in a recent interview from his home in Nashville. “You can’t plan something like that; it just happens. The very fact is that I’m playing the songs to this day and they sound just as good as the day we wrote them.”

Both artists recall the significant role the diner played in the marketing of the album. Hall — born Daryl Hohl in Pottstown – remembers his parents taking him to the Rosedale Diner as a young boy when it was located on High Street. The diner’s owner was Talmadge W. “Bill” Faulk.

When Faulk closed the diner in the mid-1960s, he had the structure moved a few miles outside of Pottstown to some land he owned along Route 724. And its new resting place was right near where Daryl Hall’s grandmother lived.

For Hall & Oates’ second album, Hall had written a song he called “Abandoned Luncheonette.”

“If you look at the lyrics of that song, even as a kid I knew that only the strong survive,” said Hall in a recent interview from his home in New York. “I’ve used that theme — the strong give up and move on and the weak give up and stay — to say that the idea is that you have to make something of your life. You have to go for it. And I guess life has proven me right about that — at least in my case.”

Hall said the song is written about people who give up and people who do something with their lives.

“It could have been called ‘Abandoned Lives.’ It was about people who gave up and wound up in the same place they started in, only not even as good.”

He said that when it came time to name the album, he and Oates decided to call it “Abandoned Luncheonette.” And when they considered what the album cover would look like, Hall recalled the abandoned diner near his grandmother’s house outside of Pottstown.

“So I said, ‘This place is all falling down. Let’s take a photographer up there and take a picture.’ So that’s what we did,” said Hall. “The cops came and threw us out because we were trespassing on somebody’s property. But we did manage to get the pictures and that’s where the concept of the cover came from. It didn’t really come from the song itself; it was just coincidental.”

In a news story that appeared in the Pottstown Mercury on Jan. 27, 1983, Faulk recalled the day in the summer of 1973 when “the two record kids” came to him and asked permission to take a photograph of the diner for the cover of their new album.

“I knew the one boy, he was nice ... poor like me,” Faulk said in the 1983 story, referring to Hall. “I said they could take a picture of it, but not go inside. It’s dangerous in there. I didn’t want anyone to get hurt. They went inside anyway.”

Forty years later, Oates confirms that account of the story.

“We basically broke into the diner and took the picture that appears on the back of the album,” said Oates.

Oates added that the photographer, credited as “B. Wilson” on the inside sleeve of the album, was Barbara Wilson, his girlfriend at the time. She was a student then at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. A teacher of hers at the school worked with the album cover picture and gave it that “hand colored” look, according to Oates.

“I look back and it’s one of the great album covers,” said Hall. “It was one of those things that just worked. It speaks as a piece of art, really. I kind of wish album covers were still around.”

Bill Faulk is also credited on the inside cover sleeve: “Luncheonette courtesy of The Man on Route 724.”

The diner became a Pottstown attraction. But as Hall and Oates continued to rise to fame, fans from all over flocked to the diner to pick off pieces of it as souvenirs. It went from being merely dilapidated to being completely destroyed.

The 1983 Mercury story mentioned that representatives from the management company for Hall & Oates at the time had been in talks with Faulk to buy the diner.

“I’d love to sell it,” said Faulk in the 1983 story. “It’s been destroyed by their fans over the years. They might as well buy it.”

But the deal never went down, likely because the diner was in such bad condition by 1983.

“I was real glad to see the boys make it,” said Faulk at the time. “They sent me an autographed copy of the album and a T-shirt. From then on, everyone wanted a piece of (the diner). I was always chasing people away from it.”

Hall said he doesn’t remember specifics on whether he and Oates wanted to buy the diner or what their level of interest in it was at the time.

“I may have said that; I may have thought that (buying the diner),” said Hall. “But my relationship with the guy that owned the place was not the greatest. He sort of blamed me and John for destroying his property.”

Bill Faulk died in 2007 and the famous diner — which sat adjacent to the entrance of Towpath Park in East Coventry Township — was eventually demolished in the early 1980s in a controlled burn by Ridge Fire Company.

Another bit of rock ’n’ roll history — which diehard Hall & Oates fans will likely know — related to the “Abandoned Luncheonette” album involves the Oates-penned song “Las Vegas Turnaround.”

According to Oates, he had met a flight attendant — they were called “stewardesses” back then — and a girlfriend on the street in New York sometime in the early 1970s and struck up a conversation with the two of them. The flight attendant’s name was Sara, and during their discussion, Sara mentioned that she and her friend were getting ready to do a “Las Vegas turnaround.”

“I didn’t know what they were talking about,” said Oates. “They told me, ‘Oh, that’s where we take a group of gamblers out to Las Vegas and then we just turn around and come back.’ That’s the type of thing a songwriter hears and turns into a song.”

Oates would eventually introduce Sara Allen to Hall, the two of them would start a relationship that lasted more than 30 years and she would become the inspiration for the song “Sara Smile,” the duo’s first Top 10 hit reaching all the way to No. 4 in 1976.